Author's Note: This is something I wrote for the CRC literary journal. It didn't make it in but one of my teachers who is on the board for the journal said she really liked it and when I went back to it I thought it was surprisingly good. It's also rather secular (know your audience) but it is still very theologically informed and I think I may write an edited version at some point with more attention to the spiritual aspects of the ideas explored.
Not too long ago, author and youtuber John Green uploaded a video in which he reflected on a town he and his wife were visiting. The whole thing was quite poetic and filled with musings on appearances and nostalgia and hidden stories but one observation stuck out. This observation was of a headstone which bore the names of both a husband and spouse but which did not indicate the year of the wife’s (Gussie Audrey Manlove) death. Precisely one week later, John’s brother, Hank, uploaded another video in which he described all that the surviving records could say about Gussie. Hank, John, and all their online followers had managed to discover the seven different names Gussie had gone by throughout her life, her three marriages, her occupation as a typesetter, the child she had while still a teenager, her last home (which was currently for sale), and her final resting place.
There’s a lot that can be said about this strange and wonderful event but as I watched it play out what it really did was remind me why I am a writer and why I love being a writer. Being a writer means being able to step outside oneself and then to step into another self entirely. It means practicing the art of writing pages and pages about a single leaf. It means pouring all of one’s knowledge and imagination and passion into a stranger glimpsed for a half-second until the writer loves the stranger a dearly as his or her own kin. It means walking into an empty classroom and passing by each desk one at a time, noting each mark, running a hand over each surface, wondering at all the inhabitants throughout the years and all the lessons and laughs and covert discussions and notes and doodles. It means walking through a crowd and asking how much is hidden behind those bored masks or being shouted down by ipods and cell phones. Being a writer means being awed and astonished and delighted and moved and saddened by absolutely anything.
Writers do not exaggerate. They do not invent astonishment or uniquity where there is only the everyday and humdrum. In fact, a real writer finds a blade of grass or a slice of bread or a breeze astonishing not only for the way it is itself but for the way it is common and categorized. Even the ordinary is extraordinary because in it there is the shocking and delightful combination of order and individuality. How much we would miss if a snowflake was so unique that there could only be one or so neatly categorized that all should be in every way the same. Everything from the most unobtrusive pebble to the grandest of mountains partakes in a world of thousands of varieties all bound together with reason and brotherly love. This garden is not so wild that we cannot live off it or fail to remember our lives for its oppressively dazzling arrays and yet neither is it so monotonous that a sane person can possibly look at it deeply and find it boring. All that is ordinary is extraordinary.
And yet we are often bored. Everything around us is lit up and yet we, the ones blessed enough to see their eternal rays, are frequently submerged in murky shadows. We look to drugs and sex and adrenaline and vanity and social approval for the joy that has always been in reach. We live in the most beautiful and substantial world imaginable and yet we descend into nihilism, crying out that there is nothing. It’s time to stop crying over milk that is neither spilled nor spoiled. It is time to open our eyes, climb out of the garbage pit we dug for ourselves, and step out into the grandeur and fullness of life.
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